On Mon, 2012-12-03 at 09:49 -0500, Martin Owens wrote:
On Mon, 2012-12-03 at 09:40 +0100, Tavmjong Bah wrote:
Doug Schepers has been actively working on an SVG connectors specification. He hasn't released a draft yet but maybe we can persuade him to. It would be good if you can look at it and comment on it.
Yes, do you have a link for this work?
In principle it is:
http://dev.w3.org/SVG/modules/connector/SVGConnector.html
But this is wildly out-of-date. I am hoping that Doug will provide a more recent version. He has said he is close to having something that he will make public. Maybe this will motivate him to get it out!
Our implementation of connectors should be as compatible aspossible with the draft (but in the Inkscape namespace to avoid a repeat of the flowed text debacle). As I understand it, the specification will include "anchor" points on objects to define where connectors attach.
That thinking doesn't exist in the branch any more. The idea of specifying in particular custom points on objects as attributes is clumsy and will require vast amounts of code to make it work like we want. But I haven't seen the svg draft specification.
I believe the idea is to have anchor points as elements that are children of the objects they are in. Doug can correct me.
Clearly the old (Inkscape) idea of having a few fixed, predetermined anchor points independent of the shape on the corners and sides is not a good one. But it is highly desirable that an object/symbol be able to have well defined anchor points that are part of the object/shape. Consider the logical symbol for a NAND gate[1], you would want to have anchor points at the two inputs and the one output. You definitely do not want to have to add anchor points every time you make a copy of the symbol.
As I've commented before, symbols and connectors are naturalto use together. The new Symbols Dialog would be more useful if symbols included connector anchor points.
There would be no connector anchor point, there would only be anchor points which could be optionally used with the connector tool.
Martin,
Tav